For example, sharing buyer behaviours and motivations helps sales early on in the lead life cycle, by tightening target groups and steering them to the right person, and also late in the lead life cycle, providing relevant, meaningful – and persuasive – content that lead to a close in a sales conversation.
The challenge is aligning the sales team to work within a demand generation infrastructure. Sales must value lead scoring, for example, and work with only those leads nearly ready to convert, or the entire exercise is wasted. When sales teams opt-in, there is greater use of time and effort because it is focused on closing only the best leads, and therefore, results in greater potential revenue. There are ways to guide and change sales behaviour, including educating and encouraging buy-in and developing lead “clawback” agreements between sales and marketing.
At the very important ready-to-buy stage of a lead, LIFT can leverage a bevy of demand creation and sales enablement tools to help make selling easier, especially with exceptionally savvy buyers looking to squeeze every last drop of value out of an organization. Just a few examples include:
Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools: these help sales manage accounts, contacts and opportunities combined with customized sales communications (CSC) platforms, that allow reps to search for suitable content across buying cycle stages.
Case studies and solution templates: these are created and delivered through the CSC platform along with advanced trial/demonstration tools.
ROI/Total Cost of Ownership (TOC) models: these can be built jointly by a sales person and prospect to showcase the maximum expected return on a sale.
- Data Mining
- Market Research
- Internal and External Factor Profiles
- Relative Targeting
- Persona Profiles
- Buyer Journey Mapping
- Messaging Strategy
- Offer Strategy
- Tactics and Touch Strategy
- Enable Sales
- Thought Leadership
- Calculators and Sales Tools